


Wisely & Slow

by cygnes



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Dreams, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 16:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11740650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: Roland is losing his mind, but he has found his heart.





	Wisely & Slow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Originally posted [here](http://manzanas-amargas.tumblr.com/post/163875029385/for-scioscribes-prompt-roland-having-trippy-ot3) on tumblr, for [scioscribe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe)'s prompt "Roland having trippy OT3 dreams during his period of mental instability in _The Waste Lands_ and feeling super-guilty about it."

He’s in the willow grove near Hambry. Late summer—just as he remembers it.

“See, isn’t this better?” a woman’s voice says from somewhere off to his left. _Susan_ , he thinks, but when he looks over it’s Susannah sitting by the creek. For a moment she seems to be surrounded by a drift of cornsilk-yellow hair. Then the dappled sunlight shifts, and he can see that she’s sitting in a bed of white and yellow flowers.

He can’t remember what the flowers are called. He can’t remember if they’re poisonous, which is a bad thing. He’s seized by worry. He needs to know. He needs to know because Susannah and Eddie can’t possibly know. This isn’t their world, and for every parallel, there are a dozen differences.

_Eddie_ , he thinks. _Where’s Eddie?_ To be alone this way, with Eddie’s wife (in this place, of all places), could shame them both.

_Then again_ , some more traitorous part of him rejoins, _who is left to hold you to account?_

“Eddie,” Roland says, or thinks he says.

“Yeah?” comes the immediate response. Roland turns his head, and is only mildly surprised to find Eddie sitting next to him, picking at the moss. He should be more concerned. If someone still so unschooled could catch him unaware—but he wasn’t really unaware, after all. He had known Eddie was here, even if he forgot.

Someone else is here, too. Someone just outside the curtain of branches, maybe looking in or maybe just waiting for them. The answer slips through his mind the same way the clear water slips through Susannah’s fingers.

“This is a nice place,” Eddie says. “Better than that fucking beach, anyway.”

Susannah laughs. “You’re setting the bar pretty low,” she says.

“Nothing’s going to crawl out of that river and try to eat us, is it?” Eddie says. One corner of his mouth twists like he’s trying not to smile.

“I can’t promise anything,” Roland says. He’s not talking about the wilderness.

Wilderness. What wilderness? Aren’t they in the sweetest, calmest grove? (But then what’s outside waiting—)

Or maybe they’re not in the grove in Mejis after all. There was another willow grove as he left the desert. A grove with standing stones where he rescued the boy, where something wanted to devour him. _But there was no boy._ He had been alone. Hadn’t he?

“Come back to us,” Susannah says. She’s close by now, reaching out to cup his face in her hands.

“Where?” Roland says. Just as there are two pasts, with the boy and without, there are two presents. The willow grove, where he would offer himself as their lover, and… There is another, loath as he is to leave this place. Another, and truer. The wilderness. Where he is their _dinh_ and to offer himself to them as an equal could only drive a wedge between two halves of a sacred union.

As he understands this, he opens his eyes to night instead of bright afternoon.

“There you are,” Eddie says, exhausted and relieved.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Susannah explains.

“We couldn’t get you to wake up,” Eddie says. “Christ, I thought maybe it was the fever coming back. And what would we do without you, man?”

“You would go on,” Roland says. He half-expects an argument but gets none. So, instead, he asks: “What did I say?”

“Something about flowers,” Susannah says. “And someone watching.” _And the boy_ , she doesn’t say, but might as well. “Was it a nightmare?”

“It was strange,” Roland says.

“What could be stranger than this?” Eddie says, gesturing expansively. Susannah elbows him lightly in the side.

“Just so,” Roland agrees. “No worse. Only different.”

“Not better?” Susannah says. An echo of her voice in his dream: _isn’t this better?_ She has the touch, like Alain did. She might know more than she says, or she might feel its echoes without really knowing. He hopes (deeply, at the raw core of himself) that she doesn’t know. It would only make going forward more difficult.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from [a song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUgTvrQm3yY&list=PL27BK64WPKNSM51swQaE7Hfi-pVpLWtid) by The Staves.


End file.
